“Sir,—I very sincerely
thank you for your letter. I feel the most pungent grief in witnessing your
disgrace; but, since it must be so, I am well satisfied to possess this
evidence of your disgrace, subscribed in your own hand and with your own name.

“If I could ever be prevailed upon to present to the
public the luxuriant but short-lived vegetation of your professions of regard,
as they now lie by me in my closet, contrasted with the expressions of this
letter, and the frivolous reasons by which they are attempted to be supported,
your character would be placed in a light in which it was never yet the lot of
a human being to be exhibited.

“I rejoice that there are not many men like you. If
there were, there would indeed be little inducement to the attempting public
benefit by the acquisition of talents, when the very production which first
obtained for its author the attention of one who was a stranger to him, is
afterwards unblushingly assigned as the

CONCLUSION OF CORRESPONDENCE.

387

ground, and, ‘above all,’
the ground of alienation and a tone of reproach that I think it would rather
unmanly to apply to the most atrocious criminal that ever held up his hand at
the bar of Old Bailey.

“My ‘unwarranted misrepresentation’ of
Mackintosh’slectures, stated in my own
terms, I am ready to support, if necessary, with a body of evidence as complete
as ever obtained the attention of a court of justice in a public trial.”

Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832)
Scottish philosopher and man of letters who defended the French Revolution in Vindiciae Gallicae (1791); he was Recorder of Bombay (1803-1812) and
MP for Knaresborough (1819-32).